Unlimited energy supplies abundant in water; scientists can extract without emitting greenhouse gases

• Australian scientists predict that a revolutionary new way to harness the power of the sun to extract clean and almost unlimited energy supplies from water will be a reality within seven years.
• Using special titanium oxide ceramics that harvest sunlight and split water to produce hydrogen fuel, the researchers say it will then be a simple engineering exercise to make an energy-harvesting device with no moving parts and emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants.
• It would be the cheapest, cleanest and most abundant energy source ever developed: the main by-products would be oxygen and water.
• "This is potentially huge, with a market the size of all the existing markets for coal, oil and gas combined," says Professor Janusz Nowotny, who with Professor Chris Sorrell is leading a solar hydrogen research project at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Centre for Materials and Energy Conversion.
• The team is thought to be the most advanced in developing the cheap, light-sensitive materials that will be the basis of the technology.
• "Based on our research results, we know we are on the right track and with the right support we now estimate that we can deliver a new material within seven years," says Nowotny.
• Sorrell says Australia is ideally placed to take advantage of the enormous potential of this new technology: "We have abundant sunlight, huge reserves of titanium and we're close to the burgeoning energy markets of the Asia-Pacific region.
• The results of the team's work will be presented in Sydney on 27 August to delegates from Japan, Germany, the United States and Australia at a one-day International Conference on Materials for Hydrogen Energy at UNSW.
• Both are frontrunners for the Nobel Prize in chemistry and are the laureates of the 2004 Japan Prize.
• Since the Japanese researchers' 1971 discoveries, science has made major advances in achieving one of the ultimate goals of science and technology -- the design of materials required to split water using solar light.